Two Tiered Internet

Wed Dec 14 15:37:57 UTC 2005

At 05:54 AM 12/14/2005, Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:

> > There are two possible ways of having a tiered system
> > - one is to degrade competitors/those who don't pay,
> > and the other is to offer a premium service to those
> > who do pay.
>
>The only way I know of to offer a premium service
>on the same network as a non-premium service is
>to delay non-premium packets. This artificial packet
>delay is known as "Quality of Service" or QoS because
>it degrades the quality of service to some users in
>order to allow other users unobstructed use of the
>network.

Actually, the cable providers have an alternative. Since the cable 
network really is "broadband" in the meaning from before it was 
coopted to mean "high speed", cable operators are able to utilize 
many channels in parallel. If they want their voice traffic to be 
unimpeded, they could certainly pick up an IP address on a private 
network space on a different cable channel (i.e. frequency pair) and 
make use of that. The consumer's Internet service, being on other 
channels, is unaffected. Yes, the backhaul fiber network would need 
to be using multiple paths as well to make that work. I have no idea 
to what extent present cable plants make use of the ability to use 
multiple channels for data service. Clearly they use it for video 
carriers, and where there is/was telephone over cable before the 
present VOIP-based offerings, those also appear to have used separate channels.

So, there is a method possible other than packet prioritization. Just 
tossing a fatter pipe at the customer isn't a solution, however. It'd 
still get clogged with p2p traffic pushing pirated music and videos 
among residential users. 